Jury Takes Up Case of Writer For New Yorker

Published: October 28, 1994

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 27—
The retrial of the libel suit by a psychoanalyst against a writer for The New Yorker went to a jury today after lawyers traded accusations in closing arguments.

Charles O. Morgan Jr., a lawyer for the psychoanalyst, Jeffrey M. Masson, told a Federal court jury that the writer, Janet Malcolm, had invented quotations to defame his client, a former projects director of the Sigmund Freud Archives. But Ms. Malcolm's lawyer, Gary L. Bostwick, described Mr. Masson as a publicity seeker who thought he could "seduce" Ms. Malcolm into writing a positive article.

The case concerns five statements Ms. Malcolm attributed to Mr. Masson in an article she wrote for The New Yorker in 1983.

The article, later published as a book, focused on Mr. Masson's dismissal from the Freud Archives in 1981 after he challenged Freud's theory that women usually fantasize accounts of childhood sex abuse.

The challenged quotations included statements that Mr. Masson had planned to turn Freud's house into a "place of sex, women, fun," that archive officials had considered him an "intellectual gigolo" and that he would be regarded as the greatest analyst since Freud.

Only one of the five quotations appears in more than 40 hours of tape recordings of Ms. Malcolm's interviews with Mr. Masson, and the context of that quotation is in dispute. Ms. Malcolm said most of the others were in her notes.

A Federal jury last year found that all five quotes were false, but it deadlocked on damages. The New Yorker was cleared of wrongdoing.

At the retrial, Mr. Bostwick characterized Mr. Masson as a down-and-out, egotistical psychoanalyst who had given conflicting statements about what he said during the interviews. Mr. Bostwick showed examples in which Mr. Masson denied making certain statements that Ms. Malcolm had on tape recordings.